George Washington University has a plan for reviving sports program; now comes the hard part

Republican file photoUMass forward Stephane Lasme, (13), takes control of a rebound against George Washington players during a 2007 game.

By JOSEPH WHITE
WASHINGTON — One of the cool things about George Washington University is that intramural sports are played on the National Mall — right in the shadows of some of America's great monuments.

But, really, there's no choice. The university is shoehorned into city blocks between the White House and the Potomac River, so there's no room to just run outside and play without heading to the expanse of green over at the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial.

"The bad news is we don't have an intramural field; the good news is we have this great field," athletic director Patrick Nero said. "It's a selling point."

Don't know much else about GW? Nero and men's basketball coach Mike Lonergan want to change that. Both hired in the spring, there are the prominent faces at the vanguard of a sports overall at the Foggy Bottom campus, charged with making the Colonials competitive and relevant both in the nation's capital and across the country. They have a full range of ideas, many of them contained a 1,200-page report put together by a committee.

It won't be easy. Consider:

GW doesn't have football, the go-to money-maker that drives college sports.

The men's basketball team, a regular NCAA tournament contender only a few years ago, has disappeared from the national scene. Forget the NCAAs: The Colonials had two years in which they failed to qualify for the Atlantic 10 tournament. Coach Karl Hobbs went 52-64, and only 25-39 in the conference, in his last four seasons before he was fired to make way for Lonergan.

GW has a bit of an identity problem nationally. Sure, the brainiacs all know where it is because of its stellar academic reputation, but some of the school's basketball players have said they often get the "Where is that?" look from friends when they say they're planning to commit to the Colonials.

Locally, GW gets swallowed up by Maryland, Georgetown and, in recent years, George Mason. Lonergan inherited a roster with only one local player. The Colonials were last in attendance in the A-10 last season, drawing 1,788 per game to the 4,338-seat Smith Center, where it will host the UMass Minutemen on Feb. 4..

GW has an outdated athletic fund-raising operation, a major deficiency given the needs of big-time college sports.

No wonder Nero and Lonergan were ambitious but realistic about their goals — as well as the amount of time it will take to achieve them — as they sat in Nero's office for a joint interview with The Associated Press.

"For us, right now, it's more about raising our profile," said Nero, who had been the commissioner of the America East conference since 2005, "just how we want to be perceived by people that care about our program — whether that be fans, whether that be recruits, whether it be our on-campus community. We all have a vision of where GW basketball wants to go."

And where is that?

"Well, I'm not shy about it," Nero said with a laugh. "I want our program to be in the top third of the Atlantic 10 eventually. We want to compete for Atlantic 10 championships over the years, but that's a long-range goal. We want to be realistic that we haven't been there the last four or five years, so it may take us that long to get back there."

To that end, Nero is beefing up the schedule. GW had one of the weakest nonconference slates in the A-10 last season; this year it's one of the toughest. Last year, the Colonials were on television so rarely that even a basketball junkie like Lonergan, who was coaching at Vermont, had trouble finding them. This year, Nero expects that 12 to 15 games will be televised.

Nero is also hiring a staff of five people devoted to fund-raising and plans to increase scholarships. Men's and women's basketball are the only two of GW's 22 sports fully funded up to NCAA scholarship limits.

He also hired Lonergan, born and bred in the D.C. area and winner of the Division III national title at Catholic in 2001. Lonergan also did well in Vermont — 126-68 since 2005 — but it was one of his dream jobs to come home and coach at GW.

"I don't want to say it's been tougher than I expected, but it's definitely what I expected. I feel I've kind of prepared my whole life to get a job like this," Lonergan said. "It'll take a lot of hard work and time to get the program back to where we want it to be."

"All jobs are tough jobs," he said. "And I think it's recruiting that's going to be tough at first. We're going to have to probably think out of the box a little bit because locally we're not as respected as we were here five, 10 years ago. I think the lack of TV coverage really hurt this program. ... We're going to try to recruit some international kids and do some different things, try to recruit kids where they're really looking at the academics."

Nero said adding football is not on the table as of this moment — "but it may be tomorrow, it may be a year from now, five years from now." He first wants to get the 22 existing teams and their facilities up to scratch. Construction is just beginning on a multimillion dollar upgrade to the baseball field across the Potomac in Arlington, Va.

"We don't want to have a baseball program that's playing on a Little League field," Nero said.

Nero is naturally following ongoing conference realignment saga, but he expressed confidence in the A-10 and GW's place in it.

"The Atlantic 10 has proven the last 30 years, 40 years, no matter what we called ourselves, that we will always be a premier basketball league, and I don't see that changing," Nero said. "If we lose one or two (schools) because of this, it would be tough. It's never easy to lose, but we've shown as a league that somebody else steps up.